How does a democratically elected city council not "have business" regulating things like zoning? If they had wanted those houses to be operated as hotels, they would have been hotels. The citizens voted for a council that would impose regulation on AirBnb and they did. This is democracy working as intended.
Amsterdam is a city being overrun by tourists and that is something local councils should be able to control. Locals have difficulty to find homes as prices are raising to high levels.
I don't understand why houses should be excluded from the capitalistic process; If councils were doing their job and permitting sufficient housing construction, then high prices = more housing = everyone is happy.
I'm no expert on Amsterdam, but checking your last article mentions rent control; why would property developers bother building new housing when the returns are artificially deflated by government action? This is precisely the problem with regulations, they damage price signals. It would not at all surprise me if the government is in part causing all of these problems.
I will also note that housing being expensive in a large, popular city is basically the case the world over, and I suspect tourists are just an easy scapegoat to deflect blame from policy failure.
Maybe, just maybe, high prices is instead because Amsterdam is building about half as much housing as it did 40 years ago, and significantly less than population growth.
I completely welcome this, the housing market is already very crowded here in Amsterdam. Investors buying houses just to rent them out to tourist all year round? No thanks, give people affordable homes first.
I needed a serviced apartment, and decided to use Airbnb because between Agoda and Airbnb, it was ever-so-slightly cheaper. When I searched it said the 100% refundable cancellation policy. So I made the booking, I adjusted the dates to 30 days, it didn't tell me that changing the date range to > 28 days changes the cancellation policy to an entirelly different policy that is dictated by the host.
So when the Taiwan border opened by 3 weeks before I was due to go to the serviced apartment, I couldn't cancel without losing 100% of the money as the 'new' cancellation policy was 100% non-refundable.
Contacting Airbnb they said there's a different policy if the booking is for more than 28 days, and so it's up to the host, so in the end the host reluctantly agreed to a 75% refund.
I could have paid 10% extra on Agoda for the same serviced apartment, and cancelled 24 hours before checking in and got 100% refund.
Airbnb letting hosts dictate cancellation policies, and not properly relaying information when paying, prevents me ever touching airbnb again.
So you agreed to a contract, didn't bother to read the fine print, this fired back and so your emotional response is schadenfreude... I believe you can do better than that
It's not always available to the user. We recently did AirBNB for the first time, and nothing was said about the checkout process until after about a day before our stay.
In that process, we were expected to do (light) housework to help prepare the house for the next guests.
We did it, but it really left a negative feeling for us to have to do housework on vacation when it wasn't expected.
The owner left us a slightly negative review saying that perhaps we weren't the right kind of customers for AirBNB and that we'd be more comfortable with all the amenities of a hotel instead. True, but a nasty thing to leave in a review.
There were other problems with the house that prevented my wife from sleeping well there that the owner gave half-assed suggestions for, and left negative comments about in the review, too.
Obviously we won't be using AirBNB again and won't be recommending it.
Anyhow, with the lack of regulations, there's no guarantee that you know what you're actually signing up for on AirBNB, especially with policies stating that the cancellation policy changes to whatever the owner says. Had we known that, we probably wouldn't have stayed there at all. Luckily it didn't affect us like it did the other poster above.
This libertarian idealism does not work in practice. I mean look up what a local council does and what they 'meddle' in, then think about what would happen if they stopped 'meddling'.
I'm very familiar with exactly what local councils do in terms of urbanism and licensing, my entire family is involved directly in every stage of the construction business, from the initial architecture design, to the real estate sale.
I am telling you this because I want you to know that i have as close of an experience with local governments in regards to this subject matter as almost anyone can have.
From my experience, and the experience of my parents, uncles and grandparents i can assure you there is almost no place where you will find more corruption and needless bureaucracy as in local councils.
while there does indeed need to be some forms of regulation, say by outlining noise limits outside the properties, or by establishing emissions standards or light level restrictions, the vast, vast majority of restrictions and regulations are fundamentally senseless and exist primarily to make work for local council employees, and to enforce peoples views on what other can do with their property.
It is NIMBYism of the worst kind, and we would all be significantly better off if local councils had their powers castrated.
